Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs, introduce new features, or both.
A generator in a manufacturing environment of an electronic device such as a mobile handset, or in other software development environments, generates update packages that are used to update the firmware of software components. These update packages are deposited into repository. Unfortunately, several different generators will be generating different kinds of information. There is no easy way to process these different kinds of update packages in mobile handsets without first determining what these update packages contain, or which application or component in the mobile handset is capable of handling them. There is no easy way to distinguish between these update packages that are generated by different vendors or manufacturers. Mobile handsets that receive them cannot easily distinguish them from each other in order to process them appropriately.
A telecom carrier or a wireless carrier will have to support storing update packages received from several different sources, each source potentially employing various different formats for data to be transferred to the carrier network/wireless network. Thus, there is currently no easy way to distinguish update packages delivered to the server environments from other types of information.
Other problems and deficiencies of the prior art will become apparent to one skilled in the art after referencing such art in view of the reminder of this specification and drawings.